1. Technical Field
This invention relates to telecommunications processing system architectures. In particular, this invention relates to supporting and integrating multiple support systems into a telecommunications system architecture for a service provider which is evolving toward a unified care management architecture.
2. Related Art
Rapid advances in data processing and telecommunications technology have lead to a vast array of communication services available to the consumer. Such telecommunication services include traditional telephone service, Internet service, cable television service, cellular phone service, paging service, combined voice and data delivery service, and many other services. Furthermore, many services may be either wireless or wireline based.
The advances in technology, though rapid, did occur over time. As a result, many telecommunications services providers began with telecommunications system architectures directly supporting a small subset of the services now available today. The early architectures were specific to individual services, such as wireline telephone services. Furthermore, the architectures commonly employed service specific billing systems, such as billing systems tailored for wireline telephone billing.
As new telecommunications services emerged, service providers added independent processing systems to their architectures to support the additional services. For example, a service provider might independently implement and maintain a billing system for wireline customers as well as a billing system for wireless customers, or a billing system for residential customers and another billing system for business customers. Mergers and acquisitions between service providers (e.g., a wireless company merging with a wireline company) also resulted in a service provider independently running multiple discrete architectures.
Beyond billing systems, each architecture also included other dedicated supporting systems, such as customer care systems. The customer care systems were responsible for communicating and receiving messages to and from the billing systems, such as messages which established new customers. In other words, as they began to offer more products and services, telecommunications service providers were faced with the time consuming, expensive, and difficult task of installing, maintaining, and upgrading multiple independent systems in multiple independent architectures.
Enhancing legacy architectures poses significant technical challenges, however. One such challenge is determining where and how to merge the multiple independent systems into a unified architecture. Given the cost and complexity of the systems, the architectures were generally only amenable to gradual merging of systems over time, rather than a rapid, complete merger. However, partially merged architectures lead to additional difficult technical challenges. For example, given a partially merged system, messages must still flow between the billing or other support systems and the remainder of the architecture in the correct manner. In addition, the correct message flow needs to be accomplished in an efficient manner with minimal disruption and reconfiguration of systems in the architecture.